Various cool software and more
Say you got a brand new advanced MP3 player for Christmas, one of those with a USB interface.. Lets say you wanted to play around with it, but still wanted to be able to return it to how it looked when you got it!? Possible? Why yes indeed 🙂 You can create an image of a usb device (possibly not all types of devices) using – USB Image Tool
Cool 🙂
As I work in an international company I often have to contact people in different timezones, and its not always easy keeping track of what the time is where.
Especially annoying is it when you have to inform about maintenance and (because you are just a tad service minded) try to write all the local times as well as local time.
Anyhow, I got a few pointers this morning;
The quick way to get local time anywhere is;
http://www.timeticker.com/
If you are planning meetings etc;
http://www.timeanddate.com
The latter site has some useful features, meeting planner and national holiday information.
If you are living in Denmark and would like to know which SMTP server to use (and can´t seem to find this on your ISP’s web-site), then try www.iptools.dk and click “SMTP servers” – from your IP these guys seem to be able to determine most popular ISP’s smtp servers.
Besides the SMTP feature there are a bunch of other cool tools on the site, so give it a spin if you are from these parts of the world.
Well the name of this software could lead to some confusion, SpyMe? Now why would I want to Spy myself, there is enough of a hassle with Spyware as it is..
Well this is different, this software is actually ‘your spy’ against other software. Let’s say you are installing a new piece of software, but actually really would like to know what exactly this software does – what files it installs – what registry changes it does, etc etc etc. Well this software will, much like the utilities used for making software packages .msi etc, create a before and after snapshot and you can thus see exactly what was done. As I read it it also offers real time viewing of all activities..
It all sounds nice, and as its FREEWARE you’ll not be ruined 😉
I still would advocate for “Sandbox-IE” as it also offers an undo function, but still – should you just want to keep a short leach on some software installed on your pc this just might be what you are looking for.
If you use the excellent “Free downloadmanager” (FDM) you should make sure you have the latest version and patches installed, a serious security bug was discovered on feb 2nd 2009 by Secunia.com
If you have ever had problems with autorun files in Windows (within a corporate environment) here is some good news for you.
If you, in your environment set up a GPO to disable autorun.inf to combat the spread of virus/malware you were likely dissapointed, yes the setting was propogated to the pc’s but it did not stop all autorun.inf’s from executing. The problem (among other things) had to do with complexities of autorun introduced with of USB devices (before it was only cd and disks).
Anyway, FINNALLY Microsoft has come up with a patch, lets just hope it works out 🙂 I have not had the opputunity to test it yet.
Patch should be introduced via Windows Update, for more details look here;u
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory/967940.mspx
Update March 8th 2009, I tested the patch, and it DOES now work on network shares as well, excellent 🙂
I was patching a newly installed Win 2003 server, and the first thing I was met by was that the Windows Update web site could not be opened unless it was added as a Trusted site, however when trying to add the site http://update.microsoft.comI was met by a dialog box stating that “”There was an unexpected error with your zone settings. Unable to add site.“. On this server Internet Explorer Enhanced security had been uninstalled.
Solution;
Are you as tired as I of the Aurora logon background every time you logon to Windows Vista, its just so darn depressing.
Well the nice people at Stardock to the rescue with “LogonStudio for Vista”, install and select your new logon background – that’s it clean and simple (is likely to work also on Windows 7).
Get it here;
http://www.download.com/LogonStudio-Vista/3000-2072_4-10696252.html
So, I had this server where I enabled Shadow Copy on the D: volume, and I could create snapshots just fine however the scheduled shadow copy jobs never ran. If I looked in “Control Panel”, “Scheduled Tasks” I could see that the job had never run, and if I tried to edit the schedule I got an error “0x8007000d: The data is invalid“. I suspected the scheduler to be the culprit, but after trying whatever I could think of and google I ended up with nada..
In the end, all I had to do was to delete one single file and viola everything works.
What Microsoft claim is that I enabled Shadow Copy before running dcpromo on a memberserver, and that thus the service (Shadow Copy) would try to use an old local account (which is deleted as the server is promoted) to schedule the jobs and subsequently fail. This in my case however was not true, however as the server was installed in Russia over our wan lines the thing might be that the server had not completed a full replication before I enabled Shadow Copy..
Anyhow, the solution can be found here;
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;822904
And to break it down, all I needed to do was to delete the one file that was in;
%SystemDrive%\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Crypto\RSA\S-1-5-18
(in my case there was only one, but according to the MS site you should only delete files that begin with “d42”.
So you need to fiddle a bit with Windows Update, the reasons can be many;
Well, for help on how to launch it on different remote machines I suggest you visit Dave’s Blog;
http://skatterbrainz.blogspot.com/2009/01/script-code-batch-running-wuauclt.html
A Desktop shortcut;
You could also simply create a desktop shortcut linking to
wuauclt.exe /resetauthorization /detectnow
This would force a Windows Updates detection to run upon clicking the shortcut, somewhat easier than launching the website.
The script you would need locally could look something like this;
@Echo off Echo Stopping Windows Update Service net stop wuauserv Echo Starting Windows Update Service net start wuauserv Echo Forcing Windows Update detection %windir%system32wuauclt.exe /detectnow
I also stumbled across some neat commands to try in case you are debugging Windows Update (update not working);
http://www.techsupportforum.com/microsoft-support/windows-xp-support/279270-automatic-update-not-started-error-1058-a.html
net stop wuauserv del /f /s /q %windir%SoftwareDistribution*.* net start wuauserv wuauclt.exe /detectnow _____________________ net stop bits net stop wuauserv %windir%system32 egsvr32.exe /s %windir%system32atl.dll %windir%system32 egsvr32.exe /s %windir%system32jscript.dll %windir%system32 egsvr32.exe /s %windir%system32msxml3.dll %windir%system32 egsvr32.exe /s %windir%system32softpub.dll %windir%system32 egsvr32.exe /s %windir%system32wuapi.dll %windir%system32 egsvr32.exe /s %windir%system32wuaueng.dll %windir%system32 egsvr32.exe /s %windir%system32wuaueng1.dll %windir%system32 egsvr32.exe /s %windir%system32wucltui.dll %windir%system32 egsvr32.exe /s %windir%system32wups.dll %windir%system32 egsvr32.exe /s %windir%system32wuweb.dll net start bits net start wuauserv wuauclt /resetauthorization /detectnow _____________________________ net stop bits net stop wuauserv regsvr32 /u wuaueng.dll /s del /f /s /q %windir%SoftwareDistribution*.* del /f /s /q %windir%windowsupdate.log regsvr32 wuaueng.dll /s net start bits net start wuauserv wuauclt.exe /resetauthorization /detectnow
PPS. Vista/Win2008 users beware.
Stopping services etc under windows vista/2008/7 require the scripts to be run as an administrator.